The present invention relates to an embedding quantizing system of vector signal, which is used for instance for DPCM (Differential pulse code modulation) of a color television signal. According to the present invention, a plurality of prediction error signals are quantized simultaneously, and therefore, has the advantage that the picture quality of a color television is improved at places such as edges in a picture, and the information quantity of a picture signal to be transmitted is reduced.
A differential pulse code modulation (DPCM) and predictive quantizing have been known to encode analog signal into digital pulses in order to reduce the information quantity so that the picture information may be transmitted with narrow frequency band and/or in a short time. That DPCM system is described in the Bell System Technical Journal, May-June 1966, pages 689-721.
However, the combination of a prior DPCM system and a prior predictive quantizing is not enough for a high speed transmission of a picture signal. For instance, the high speed transmission within 10 seconds is requested for the transmission of an RGB still picture (red component, green component and blue component of 3 primary colors) with 512.times.512 picture elements. When the transmission speed is 48 Kbps, the allowable number of the bits for each quantization in that case is less than 3 bits. Considering that each of R, G and B components are usually quantized into 8 bits, large information compression has been requested.